In the body of your email first tell me the council member your question is for. Second ask your question concisely in one to two sentences maximum. Third any and all details after that. This is the formula to give you the best chance of getting on the air.

I do what I can to get as many of your questions as possible on the air but can’t always get to all of them. Our council is made of a wide variety of experts in everything from the tactical to the practical and everything in between.

To get more information on our Expert Council visit our “Meet the Expert Council Page” to learn more about them and their specific areas of expertise.

Join Me Today As Our Experts Discuss…

Thoughts on block chain for payroll and human resources – Ben Fitts

Choosing an HF antenna for HAM Radio – Tim Glance

Fencing for pastured pork – Darby Simpson

What loss of smell may mean for your health – Doc Bones

More on local politics – Nicole Sauce

Personality conflicts in education – Mike and Sue Laprise

Dealing with anaerobic compost – Geoff Lawton

The coming demographic shifts in America and what they may mean – Jack

Remember to comment, chime in and tell us your thoughts, this podcast is one man’s opinion, not a lecture or sermon. Also please enter our listener appreciation contest and help spread the word about our show. Also remember you can call in your questions and comments to 866-65-THINK (866-658-4465) and you might hear yourself on the air.

Join the MSB Today

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Every day I bring you an item on Amazon that I personally use or has been purchased by many members of the audience and I have researched enough to recommend.

Today’s TSP Amazon Item of the day is Garrett Juice Plus. I realized that while Garrett Juice is part of my 4 part primary fertility program I have never reviewed it individually.

First right up front I will tell you that you don’t have to buy Garrett Juice, Howard Garrett (aka The Dirt Doctor) publishes the recipe to make it yourself right on his site. In fact for many years he didn’t even have a commercial product available. Eventually he realized that not everyone has all day to garden and some of us would be happy to pay 30-40 bucks for a gallon of his stuff.

It may seem expensive but one gallon of concentrate makes 64 gallons of spray. Consider if you wanted to spray an acre you would use 35 gallons and for the home gardener buying it pre made starts to make a ton of sense.

Over the years I developed my own approach to this, you can see I have zero brand loyalty here, each of the four products is from a different company, why, I found the best of each category. The four products are…

I also want to be totally upfront about something. Garrett Juice being shipped by the liquid gallon makes it cost more online then it does in a local store. So if they sell it where you live, in local stores (Lowes and some garden stores carry it in my area) you may be better off getting this item locally. I actually buy the more expensive Pro Version online because while I can find the plus and standard products, locally no one ever has the pro.

So how do I use Garrett Juice? I spray everything with it, my trees, my plants, etc. I also add garlic pepper tea when I spray it often to help with pets. I do a soil drench in my garden beds with it twice a year as well. If you saw some of the videos of this last season you know my plants blow and go like crazy on this regime.

There is another great use for this stuff and I have confirmed it to be as simple as this. Get some orange oil, add two ounces to a gallon of water with two ounces of Garrett Juice and you have fire ant killer. There used to be a product called Antifuego that you could by for this, but due to the cost of shipping they no longer ship. So now Garrett Juice plus some orange oil does the same thing.

The way you use it is put 2 oz of Garrett Juice (I use the plain version for this to save money and buy it locally) and 2 oz of orange oil into a gallon of water, and slowly soak mounds, this will melt all the ants and queens and you should have a dead mound in a day. We have tons of fire ants here, this has been a God send in controlling them.

Okay so there are three levels of Garrett Juice, so what is the difference…

Garrett Juice Pro– Is made with everything above plus beneficial soil organisms that are alive. Hence it has a maximum shelf life of 18 months, but I try to use it up in a year or less for maximum effectiveness.

So give Garrett Juice Plus or Garrett Juice Pro a try today, gardening season is upon us. For maximum success this year I recommend my full four part fertility regime, and remember out of those four it is quite possible that even though I am linking to Amazon here, you can save money on Garrett Juice by buying it locally, specifically if you want the base formula or the plus, again I can’t seem to find the pro version anywhere around here and Howard lives in Dallas!

Remember you can always find the TSP Amazon Item of the day by just going to TspAz.com and by shopping at TspAz.com anytime you shop on online you help support TSP and the work we do here no matter what you buy.

Remember to comment, chime in and tell us your thoughts, this podcast is one man’s opinion, not a lecture or sermon. Also please enter our listener appreciation contest and help spread the word about our show. Also remember you can call in your questions and comments to 866-65-THINK (866-658-4465) and you might hear yourself on the air.

Join the MSB Today

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Remember in addition to discounts to over 40 vendors who supply stuff you are likely buying anyway, tons of free ebooks and video content, MSB Members also get every edition of The Survival Podcast ever produced in convenient zip files in blocks of 24. More info on the MSB can be found here.

Every day I bring you an item on Amazon that I personally use or has been purchased by many members of the audience and I have researched enough to recommend.

Today’s TSP Amazon Item of the day is the Komelon USA Tape Measure. These are available in 12-Foot, 16-Foot and 25-Foot lengths. I had three requests in the past month to do a tape measure for item of the day so I guess it is about time I give up the goods on the one I like best.

Let me start off with something, I have had very expensive tape measures break and by break I mean come unraveled and once that happens, just accept your fate and throw it away. It usually happens when someone is “helping” and jerks the thing hard past the end of its reach (for which there is no good reason) and blammo it is toast.

So I stopped in my quest for a tape that would never break, because additionally I don’t know what it is but there are three things I lose more than anything else. They are in order sharpie markers, tape measures and nail clippers. I just don’t get it, I am talking not leaving a room or a garage, having just had it in my hand and fing GONE LIKE A FART IN THE WIND. Sometimes they show up, a day, week or month later, sometimes they are gone forever.

I tend not to believe in the super natural but if their are gnomes or some such shit that steals things, they must adore pens, tape measures and nail clippers.

So I set out a couple years ago to find a tape I could buy 2-4 of at a time, keep some in a drawer so when I lost one I just had another one. Funny thing though, I have misplaced these but I have yet to break one. I am going to call it luck but when I got sick of losing tapes and tried to find a low cost reliable one this was the first one I tried.

Now here is what got me to give them a look, other than a lot of positive reviews it was a feature called “power lock”. Now most tapes work like this, you run the tape out and then engage the lock. You disengage the lock to retract it. “Power Lock” is the reverse, it is sort of always on, when you run out the tape it locks so it will not retract but you can just keep running it out until you have enough to measure what you are working on.

When I thought about this, my first thought was, “why the hell would you make a tape the old way in the first place”? Seriously have you ever run out a tape and thought, man I am so happy that it didn’t self lock? Have you ever run out a tape and not needed to lock it, or at least hold it with finger tension so you could use it to well, measure something? Or have you ever thought, man when I lock that thing I am so glad you have to unlock it to pull more tape out of the holder? I mean a bird or a frog or something might just grab it and pull it out and mess me up!

In the end it seems completely backwards to have tapes lock the way they always have. If you have used tapes your entire life it does take a day or two to stop reaching for the lock and inadvertently unlocking it, but once you get used to it you will never and I mean never want anything else.

Once again these are available in 12-Foot, 16-Foot and 25-Foot lengths. Personally I see little utility for 16 foot tape measures and I instead have standardized on keeping a 12 foot and 25 foot tapes around.

My rational is as follows. The 12 foot tape is compact and caries easily on a belt or in a pocket. Because it is so small I tend to put it in my pocket when working and hence the gnomes that steal my stuff are less likely to find it. I find that a 12 foot tape with be enough for 90% of my daily project work, cutting lumber, measuring pipes, doing estimates etc.

For everything else I go grab my 25 footer that lives in a place in my pantry that the gnomes have yet to find, I use it and I put it back. Take that you thieving little gnomes!

In all seriousness I have never had a 25 foot tape in my hand and said man I wish this was 9 feet shorter! So here is what I recommend, pick up two pack of the 12-Foot, tapes for only 15.71, that way you will have a spare if the gnomes get one of them! Then pick up at least one 25-Foot one and keep it in your tool box or some other gnome safe location.

Remember you can always find the TSP Amazon Item of the day by just going to TspAz.com and by shopping at TspAz.com anytime you shop online you help support TSP and the work we do here no matter what you buy.

Steve Storch is a renaissance man. He is of modern times, but retains a wealth of historical and spiritual wisdom.

His energy and the company that contains it – Natural Science Organics – are responsible for the invention of the Vortex Brewer® compost tea system and some of the finest biological inoculants and mineral supplements on the planet.

Exposed to the realities and potentials of the natural world from an early age, Storch has developed a healthy respect for the mechanisms of living systems and a penetrating insight into how to work with them.

He now creates and lives with his family on a certified organic and BioDynamic farm in East End Long Island that has been farmed undisturbed for over 350 years.

Storch utilizes the teachings of philosopher and scientist Rudolf Steiner, who in 1924 gave a series of lectures outlining biodynamic farming principles that can now be found in a work called The Agriculture Course, a must read for anyone interested in plants or gardening.

He joins us today to discuss soil biology, biodynamic farming and the vortex brewer.

Remember to comment, chime in and tell us your thoughts, this podcast is one man’s opinion, not a lecture or sermon. Also please enter our listener appreciation contest and help spread the word about our show. Also remember you can call in your questions and comments to 866-65-THINK (866-658-4465) and you might hear yourself on the air.

Join the MSB Today

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Remember in addition to discounts to over 40 vendors who supply stuff you are likely buying anyway, tons of free ebooks and video content, MSB Members also get every edition of The Survival Podcast ever produced in convenient zip files in blocks of 24. More info on the MSB can be found here.

Every day I bring you an item on Amazon that I personally use or has been purchased by many members of the audience and I have researched enough to recommend.

Today’s TSP Amazon Item of the day is the Bristle Free Grill Brush by Gven. Guys and gals this one is important, it may actually save your life or at least from a painful trip to the ER and surgery to go along with it and no I am not kidding.

Finding this started a couple years ago for me, I went to get some stuff at a box store and needed a new cleaning brush for my grill. There were no wire bristle ones, all were that poly plastic nylon crap! I was dismayed, finding one of these had never been a problem. Later that week Dorothy was watching a show called “Untold Stories of the ER” and I sat down to watch with her.

In this episode a kid was having a ton of abdominal pain. They ended up doing an scan and found a tiny piece of metal had gotten into his intestines, it pierced the walls and had tangled the intestines together in a knot! As soon as the father saw the scan he knew what it was, a bristle from a grilling brush. It clicked, clearly this had become an issue and that is why none were in the store.

The problem for me was, nothing really works as good as a metal bristle brush for cleaning a grill. As usual the free market really is a wonderful thing that responds to demand. These types of spiral form brushes started to show up. They have no bristles an the wire is thicker, running in one continuous piece. Nothing to get left behind and end up in your burger or chop, that may later end up in you.

This one made by Gven is the best of them I have tried. It is built solid with heavy materials. It has almost 200 reviews with a 4.5 star rating and unlike many impostors it has a grade of an A at Fakespot.com. The twin heads are staggered and do a great job cleaning off your grill.

My procedure is simple, as soon as I am done cooking while the grill is still hot, I hit it with my brush until it is clean enough for me, done. Rinse brush in hot water and hang up to dry.

So give the Gven Bristle Free Cleaning Brush a shot if you don’t have something like this already. And if you have one of those old style brushes, frankly get rid of it. Sure the risk is low but the risk is also real. See the video below of one study from just one ER, over 18 months they had 6 injuries related to this. Again that is one ER, so extrapolate that across the country. Again the risk is real.

Now here is what I think happened, given we used these brushes for 40 years and this problem is kind of new. Over the last 15 years the quality of all goods has slipped, when it slipped on this type of product, bad things happened. That said why risk it, the brush in this article works fantastically, it is safe for all grill surfaces and you can be sure your family and friends won’t end up in the ER on what should have been a wonderful day.

Remember you can always find the TSP Amazon Item of the day by just going to TspAz.com and by shopping at TspAz.com anytime you shop on online you help support TSP and the work we do here no matter what you buy.

Spring is starting to spring and 2018 plans are being executed and results are already being seen, so I figured it was time for a homestead update show. Lot’s 0f things are new and different this year. Major expansion of all the aquaponics and aquatics systems, new plans for the food forest without the ducks involved and more.

It really has been an amazing journey that we have all been on together, this is our third property since we began TSP back in June of 2008, we are almost at a decade together at this point, so we will also do a little looking back and talk about how our past experiences are steering our future plans.

Join Me Today to Discuss..

Sowing seeds in the food forest

About half the trees are breaking bud or in full bloom

Hole bees are going in soon

New this year thornless honey locust and native persimmon

Another round of sand cherries going in

The little chickens are moving up in housing as soon as the ducks are gone

Dixie Rainbow or some other chickens will be joining the little chickens

Quail egg and meat production will return once the egg thieves move

One Craigslist ad, 48 hours and half the ducks are gone

If I can’t catch the muscovies soon, at least the big drakes are going on the grill #22lr

Outdoor kitchen is in the final strokes, need furniture and an island now

Likely some WWJWs are coming up (work with jack weekends)

New herb garden is going in using the outdoor kitchens sink and mini earth works

2018 is all about harnessing the last 4 years of hard work into a lifestyle homestead

Remember to comment, chime in and tell us your thoughts, this podcast is one man’s opinion, not a lecture or sermon. Also please enter our listener appreciation contest and help spread the word about our show. Also remember you can call in your questions and comments to 866-65-THINK (866-658-4465) and you might hear yourself on the air.

Join the MSB Today

Want Every Episode of TSP Ever Produced?

Remember in addition to discounts to over 40 vendors who supply stuff you are likely buying anyway, tons of free ebooks and video content, MSB Members also get every edition of The Survival Podcast ever produced in convenient zip files in blocks of 24. More info on the MSB can be found here.

Every day I bring you an item on Amazon that I personally use or has been purchased by many members of the audience and I have researched enough to recommend.

Today’s TSP Amazon Item of the day is Ras El Hanout seasoning from Pinch Spice Market. Pinch has a variety of interesting stuff I will be trying soon. I used the Raas El Hanout (pronounced like – ross el ha newt) in my first ever attempt at tagine cooking to do a tagine quail. While I still need to dial in cook time and temp settings a bit to master the tagine, the flavor was off the hook.

I am a big fan of making up your own mixes but this is one I am happy to let someone else do. Ras El Hanout seasoning is sort of like the Moroccan answer to curry. It is curry like in flavor (similar to a yellow Indian curry) but not as strong in that “curry way”. I’ll put it this way, my wife doesn’t like Indian yellow curries at all, but she loved this stuff. And yet I find them quite similar.

The way it is like curry though is there is no one way to make a Ras El Hanout, every cook in Morocco is likely to have their own, and of course theirs is “the best”. This mix uses a lot of spices, you will see recipes for it with anywhere from 15-30 different ingredients. This brand was the best I could find, the company says they worked on it for over six months and the effort shows. It is made up of a whopping 26 spices, they are,

cumin

black pepper

paprika

grains of paradise

coriander

turmeric

cayenne

lemon peel

cinnamon

cardamom

allspice

juniper

nutmeg

glangal

ginger

mace

fenugreek

mustard

clove

anise seed

licorice

rose

lavender

ajwain

hibiscus

Yea with a list that long of so many exotic spices I am content to let someone else mix it. It is a bit pricey at 12 bucks for 4 ounces but a little goes a long way. For the quail I put four quail in an unglazed tagine, it is important to properly season a tagine before using it. I added colored baby carrots, fingerling potatoes, shallots, olive oil, water, garlic, lime zest and bay. I also used about two teaspoons of the Ras El Hanout.

The quail leg quarters were perfect but I slightly over cooked the breast, I think I need to cook at a lower temp and sear the birds before putting them in the tagine. Also a bit more liquid to more braise the quails. They would be best cut into quarters too, so they braise better. These were older cull birds and since they free range in the aviary they do get a bit tough. Next up will be tagine venison!

The liquid in the tagine was a wonderful clear yellow broth, it screams out to go on rice or couscous. We really try to keep carbs as low as we can but I am going to have to make up a bit of either at some point try with this. I would also say saffron would be a good addition to the basic recipe of a tagine dish.

This seasoning though need not be confined to tagine cooking, it will add huge flavor to almost anything. Fried potatoes would be exotic as hell seasoned with this. I can only imagine what slow cooked lamb in this stuff will be like. Based on the taste of the quail it seems like this stuff will have a love affair with chicken, slow cooked, grilled, saute’d, it doesn’t matter. In fact here are a bunch of ideas for using Ras El Hanout.

This is one of those things that is like a cooking cheat code, sort of like a curry paste or a stock paste is. You want to take something in a certain direction, add this to taste and you are a kitchen rock star that night.

Oh and did you see the one thing not in this stuff? Salt! This is good in a lot of ways. First I hate paying for high end organic spices when 10-20 percent by weight is fricken salt! That is not good economics. Second I like to control my own salt levels. But I realized that some people have to omit or severely limit salt, wow, this is a product for you, massive flavor, no salt.

So give Ras El Hanout seasoning from Pinch Spice Market and I think you are really going to enjoy it. Spices and seasonings are a great thing for preppers to store on hand. If you are inclined to store some extra of this stuff, I would go with a well sealed ball jar. Don’t use vac seal bags with anything like this, you end up with bad clumping, trust me I know.

Remember you can always find the TSP Amazon Item of the day by just going to TspAz.com and by shopping at TspAz.com anytime you shop on online you help support TSP and the work we do here no matter what you buy.

No we won’t be talking about planting little Timmy and little Tammy seeds in the garden but rather how gardening can plant seeds of knowledge, compassion, resiliency and skills in our children. One of my true heroes in the world is Geoff Lawton and Geoff made a statement that sounds almost absurd in some ways…

All the world’s problems can be solved in a garden!

Even I balked a bit at that statement at first, then stepped back and said well, metaphorically is how he means it. But I realized when I looked at how he said it, he was dead serious. So I stepped way back and said, is this statement true.

When I did so I realized you had to look at it though the right lens. No one thing is generally sufficient to fix any major problem, so a true solution is one that sets things in motion. It is that initial motion that creates inertia and that provides an opportunity for more things to be done, and in the end the problem is solved or mitigated as much as can be done at the time. So true solutions are the catalyst, the spark of a solution, that create something akin to a trophic cascade.

So today we will ask the question, if a few packs of wolves can cause life to explode and a river to moderate and change its course, what might be the effect of teaching our children, how to do something as simple as grow a garden.

Join Me Today to Discuss…

Can we really solve the word’s problem with a garden

What is a trophic cascade and how can we hope to create one

What happens when a child learns about gardening

They learn patience

They learn actions have concequences

They learn to feed themselves and others

They learn to recognize patterns

They learn to solve problems

They learn the value of hard work

They learn that all living things have a place in our world

They learn that everything in life is a cycle

They learn that some things are beyond your control

They learn to teach

They learn how to find answers from elders, literature, etc.

They learn a hundred more things

How can this create a trophic cascade?

The difference between solving a problem and setting a solution in motion

Remember to comment, chime in and tell us your thoughts, this podcast is one man’s opinion, not a lecture or sermon. Also please enter our listener appreciation contest and help spread the word about our show. Also remember you can call in your questions and comments to 866-65-THINK (866-658-4465) and you might hear yourself on the air.

Join the MSB Today

Want Every Episode of TSP Ever Produced?

Remember in addition to discounts to over 40 vendors who supply stuff you are likely buying anyway, tons of free ebooks and video content, MSB Members also get every edition of The Survival Podcast ever produced in convenient zip files in blocks of 24. More info on the MSB can be found here.

The six price is the best price per ounce but six of these is a LOT of it. So I think most people will do best with the four pack at $12.92 or only $3.23 a can.

I first discovered how great this stuff was when a listener called in about it. We actually had some that a house sitter had brought with her during one of our vacations. So I gave the test of tests at our place, washing a simple glass.

You see our water is hard, really hard, washing a glass makes it get hazy, the more you wash it the worse it gets. We tried everything, washing glasses on hot water, using vinegar or special rinse enhancers in the dish washer.

It got so bad I refused to buy new glassware, prompting a buddy to declare that I was, “Too cheap to own a decent martini glass”. The nerve of some people!

Anyway I got one of my worst high ball glasses out and gave it a quick scrub and it looked good but I was skeptical, they always look good wet, they haze over as they dry. But after drying the glass it was still crystal clear.

Since I have tried it on faucets, stained sink drains, etc. and it works wonderfully for all of them. Check out this video of one of our hazy glasses being restored right here.

In any event consider adding this stuff to your homestead. I can see why they call it “Barkeeper’s Friend” but I really see it as home owners friend. It doesn’t do everything but it does somethings better than anything else. So consider picking up a six pack,four pack or at least a single can today. If you give this stuff a try it will earn a full time place in your cleaning supplies.

Remember you can always find the TSP Amazon Item of the day by just going to TspAz.com and by shopping at TspAz.com anytime you shop on online you help support TSP and the work we do here no matter what you buy.